Pillars of Eternity 2 barrelling on through stretch goals

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Following the launch of its crowdfunding campaign on Thursday, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire [official site] reached its goal in one day and has already started barrelling through stretch goals. Turns out, quite a few folks are up for Obsidian continuing their fantasy RPG – this time with pirates aplenty. Our own John declared the first game “A wonderful, enormous and spellbinding RPG, gloriously created in the image of BioWare’s Infinity classics, but distinctly its own.” I’ll have to quiz him on pirates.

Pillars 2 will take the game to the Deadfire archipelago, a string of islands ranging in climate from deserts to tropics, on the tail of an awakened god. The basic pitch is: Pillars but in new lands, prettier, and with a more-alive world.

As I write this, the Pillars 2 crowdfunding campaign on Fig is just under $1.7 million (£1.35 million). The initial goal was $1.1 million (£0.9m). As well as the usual ‘fling money at people’ crowdfunding method, Fig lets people actually financially invest in projects. The current breakdown is about $900k in pledges and $800k investment.

Pillars 2 has already hit stretch goals to add sub-classes, a level cap boost, and a Russian localisation. Next up is a monk companion and an expansion of the AI settings introduced with Pillars’ expansion. Obsidian explain in an update:

“With this addition, you can customize AI behaviors with a visual UI allowing for the fine tuning spell-casting and ability use. For example, the order that an AI casts spells in can be defined and conditional logic can be set for each spell. This gives you the power to preset combat AI for Wizards, Priests, and Ciphers based on a variety of gameplay conditions.”

Sounds good! I’ve not played Pillars but I did enjoy building intricate scripts in Dragon Age games, making autonomous party members with builds far more clever than I’d ever be bothered to micromanage.

Though do bear in mind that stretch goals are as volatile as any other part of a crowdfunded game, as I’ll get into with the next post I write in 3-2-1-go!

65 Comments

I got an e-mail about this and clicked super excitedly on the fund link they gave me… and then I saw it was on Fig. I wish Obsidian all the best, but Fig is shady as fuck and I refuse to co-operate with that sort of nonsense. I’ll buy it when it’s done.

You maybe a nice person. But every person on Reddit who have told me to watch that, when I look into their posting history its always full of words like MAGA, ess doub… you know the rest. I won’t even type them since I wouldn’t be surprised if RPS have a spam filter in place. Also the video seems to be from 2015, they filed additional papers since then and was approved.

I think I actually did an honest attempt to watch that video, and if it is the one, he described having several companies in a complex company structure as some sort of red flag. Every place I’ve worked at with more than 100 employees have started partitioning different business areas or projects into separate companies. If one of them go to hell, it doesn’t take all of them with it. In Figs case, lets say one studio becomes bankrupt. If they all pool their funds into one company, creditors like banks would by law (at least here in Sweden) be the first ones entitled to money, subcontractors not yet paid for their services would be a distant second. Employees have their last salary guaranteed by the state. Saying, “no see, this money is earmarked to develop a certain computer game, the fans would be terribly disappointed and angry if you took that money” would hardly fly. That is why they do split off separate companies per project.

It all depends on how the structure is. I get the feeling from the video description is that it is not a separation by business avenue, but rather a more classic shady shell structure: e.g. you have on company have the assets which are worth something like patent/copyrighted material and so forth, which you “sub license” to your another of your own company which is the one which takes the risk, debts, and do all business transaction and risk the bankruptcy. The second company has no real assets and has all the risk.

Which is what he meant when you look at the diagram with “Loose Tooth Industry” and “Fig publishing”.

Is it true and well researched ? I have no idea.

But from 13:00 onward it does not put the whole in good light in my lay view.

My only question re: Fig is what happens to a game’s investors if a game’s crowdfunding is so successful that it doesn’t need any Fig funds. As I understand it, Fig only gets a share of a game’s sales receipts if the game has been given money through Fig funds; otherwise, all the money goes to the game developers, less a fraction to Fig for hosting the crowdfunding campaign. Even if a game turns out to be wildly successful, Fig – and thus investors – are not entitled to any of the profit since they technically didn’t contribute to its development. In the meantime, investor money is added to the general Fig funds, which can be used to develop another game. If that second game becomes wildly profitable, Fig makes a windfall – but the investors don’t get any money since they are technically entitled only to a share of game A’s profits and not game B’s.

That understanding is incorrect, the developer signs a licensing agreement and is required to pay investors their share. Actually it’s even more in the investors favor than that, if the developer decides not to use money towards development it’s profit and the investors get a share of that.

Watched the video. This dangerousanalysis guy is cringe inducingly naive. He successfully identifies that investing in video games is incredibly risky and then proceeds to explain the ways DoubleFine and other founders have protected themselves from liability and public backlash. He presents this as the smoking gun example of… what exactly? … double fine trying to earn money? What a reveal!

Wow you replied so quick to this article, almost like you have an alert out to post negative things anytime Fig is mentioned. Kinda like it’s personal vendetta or something – this wouldn’t have anything to do with Tim Schafer would it..?

I have a question for all you PoE players… I’m slowly playing through the game, but i actually find the combat rather boring and fiddly.

Because of the pausable realtime, most combat involves the enemies charging my party and surrounding it (unless i’m in a doorway) and then me doing ‘knockdown’ ‘heal’ or ‘Fireball’ now and then, but 90% of the time i leave my guys to do whatever it is they are doing.

In turn based games like Xcom, i plan each turn, do combos, lock down some enemies while engaging others and each section of combat is a deep and meaningful enjoyable reactive experience.

I’m sure Baldur’s Gate used to be a lot better than PoE is, but it was a LONG time ago that i played that so i might be wrong.

Maybe a large % of PoE abilities just aren’t that exciting, i barely do any of the cleric’s defensive buffs, and because of the situational targeting of many spells, and the realtime movement, i often can’t cast many things due to enemies moving in and out of zones, so i just fall back to the same 4-5 abilities every single combat.

Make the difficulty higher? Change your party composition? Change your main character class(i.e. cypher)? It’s possible that PoE isn’t for you, but it’s also possible that the way you’re playing it isn’t your style.

However, i think most of the abilities in this one are just bland and i never feel the need to use them. I also feel that enemy characters have a much easier time of just running around everyone and attacking the units at the rear much more so than in previous games of this ilk. My mage seems to have a target painted on his head, even for spiders who for some reason know the intricacies of strategic combat.

Everything just ends up a bit of a melee and i don’t end up using intelligent tactics, just pressing the same abilities time and time again.

e.g. My main character is a Goldknight Paladin. He has a shield mode (on), he can pick something as his target for this combat (which i use) and apart from that, he doesn’t really have much to use, although he is level 8.

The Mage uses his 3 x dancing missiles a lot, and sometimes a tome bash when something gets close, and if an enemy is pretty tough i just spam all of his other spells asap.

The Cleric is pretty dull, all of his buffs are pretty boring, so i just heal people.

The Fighter knocks people over and pulls them close.

The Chanter summons skeletons or in a pinch knocks enemies over with a wave.

The girl with the wolf is awful, target something and shoot it for ages, and the wolf invariably dies. I have just met the Cipher woman so swapped her for the girl.

I don’t really use any other abilities at all.

For example, in Dragon age, my archer would have pinning shot, split shot, exploding shot, head shot, two modes to be in, and the combat was slow enough that i’d have to intelligently use them all to get through many encounters.

Perhaps part of the problem is ‘X per rest’ of PoE which means i end up trying not to use anything as the next encounter might be worst. In DA, it was all about using up the stamina (or whatever it was called) points you had left at that time.

I have two recommendations that may help you get more enjoyment out of PoE:

First, if you haven’t already, make sure you’ve read up on PoE’s Engagement system – it’s a fairly important factor in combat, and its mechanics are unique to Obsidian’s latest isometric RPG’s (PoE, Tyranny), so it’s not something you’d know from other IE-style games; essentially, it amounts to the first enemy that gets into melee range of your character sticking to them – but the important part is that warriors can increase that number up to 3, with talents, and even higher with certain items. Between that and taunts, you should be able to reliably keep mobs away from your squishies.

The second suggestion would be to download IEmod, a mod consisting of a fairly comprehensive set of tweaks designed to make the game feel more like the old IE games (hence the name). Each tweak can be individually toggled in the options menu, so you can pick and choose to best match your preferences. Importantly, it also allows you a fair bit of control over the “abilities per rest” system, so you can set it so certain spell tiers become “per encounter” once you reach a certain level (which is how it used to work before it was changed in a patch), or even set all spells to be per encounter, if you’re tired of the resting restrictions on your casting. There is also another mod out there that makes resting no longer use up supplies, so that, like in Baldur Gate, you can rest all you want, if you aren’t a fan of PoE’s system.

Hope that helps, I know IEmod definitely added a lot to my enjoyment of the game (in my case, only being able to detect hidden objects and traps while sneaking drove me crazy)

Detecting objects while not sneaking was added in one of the latest patches. There’s a big penalty to detection though, which makes it useless until you have a very high skill.
I wish there was a mod that only changed the detection ability. IEMod has gone bananas with dozens of options.

I have found PoE pretty manageable although a bit fiddly. I’ve got it set to pause on spotting a hostile. My party then stealth and manoeuver to a favourable position. The front rank (Sagani and Eder) fire arbalests to draw the bulk of aggro then swap to melee weapons and close, spaced to snare the incoming melee enemies. Kana and me then fire, the priest throws his huge radius interdiction debuff and Aloth uses slicken if appropriate.

I’m playing cipher this time, which is still considered potent despite having been rebalanced a lot. After shooting an enemy, preferably with the rather awesome lead spitter, I have plenty of energy to cast ectopsychic echo on Itumaak (Sagani’s pet) which can then run around behind the most annoying enemies and stand there while it rips them to shreds.

The more traditional casters have some damage spells but when the fighting gets tough it’s far better to have debuffed several of the enemy to uselessness than to have blown one of them to bits. Either way unless it’s a really easy fight, expending at least a portion of your spells to save a big chunk of endurance makes sense and speeds things up too. I tend to know pretty quickly if it’s a routine fight or time to unload the big stuff. I know some of the fights in the White March had me sweating in ways the original campaign never did!

You’re not wrong that the combat is a bit dull, but PoE2 stands to be a lot better, as I’ll explain in a moment. The devs have acknowledged that far too many of the combat abilities relied on passives and maths instead of *doing* stuff. I think the infinity engine games were just as bad, but they have the excuse of being so old and cribbing from adnd 2.0 rules.
The ai is also in a very weird place now. It was pretty poor at the game’s release but has now been improved to the point where it is very smart, but also incredibly predictable. It will always, always target the most lightly armoured character, leading to silliness such as tactical oozes and the spiders you mentioned.

If you take a look at Obsidian’s last game, Tyranny, they introduced more visceral and interesting combat abilities for each class, many of which improved mobility on the battlefield, or knocked opponents around. Combat is a lot more dynamic and satisfying as a result. Now that game has its own problems, but Obsidian have clearly learned from their mistakes. PoE2 promises to be a much less stale affair.

If you want more tactical combat try Divinity: Original Sin. It’s turn based, environment effects are a big deal (so the placement of your party is very important),and encounters are hand crafted and don’t respawn (so every fight is unique).

I was playing that on my 32 bit system which kept crashing. I upgrded to 64 bit and haven’t gone back yet. I think the biggest annoyance in that was the lack of hexes or spaces, so often my melee characters couldn’t quite reach melee combat due to the starting positions of characters which made it feel a little arbitrary.

You are not the only one with that feeling. I still liked it, but I am guessing it is more because there is no other of the same genre/quality… So default of a perfect apple you also eat and enjoy the blemished one rather than starve.

I think this is unfair. I never played the old school RPGs (just weren’t my thing at the time,) but I have found a lot to like in PoE. This is mainly the writing of the characters and the intriguing plot, but there are some interesting mechanics going on too.

But I too found the combat to be pretty boring. Initially, the drip feed of characters and new ways of playing the combat kept coming just as I was settling into a groove, so it kept things interesting, but by the time I had seen most classes it just lost my interest, as combat encounters kept rapidly coming at me and not offering much of interest. I reached the first main city, explored the sewers a bit and drifted away from it.

I think the difference is that with turn-based combat, you have to give orders so of course you end up planning each turn. In real time with pause you can plan, but most of the time you just let things run their course. Personally I much prefer the latter.

As for your getting swarmed problem, I remember having trouble with that too at first, but if you use summons you should be creating enough of a barrier to keep your squishies out of harm’s way.

X per rest is annoying. I use those abilities a lot less because like you, I always expect to need them in a tougher next fight, which usually doesn’t come before my next rest anyway. Same goes for other one-use items in RPGs, or special ammo in FPSs. I guess I’m just a hoarder.

Spells per rest gets a worse reputation than it deserves, at least as far as PoE is concerned. In the old IE games it could make your casters feel like dead weights in most fights becasue outside of casting they had mediocre to abysmal combat statistics. In Pillars they did a decent job of giving the casters with per rest limitations the ability to contribute with weapons. Aloth is a solid damage dealer with Blast / Penetrating Blast and a Dangerous Implement class weapon, while also having probably the best per encounter ability in Arcane Assault. Durance can be a beast with an Arquebus from his Magran specialisation, and gets an AoE heal on per encounter. Hiravias can be a literal beast with his per encounter Spiritshift. Basically, per rest spells aren’t the fun block they used to be.

The game does need a system to ration spell use while keeping the classes diverse. I don’t think having every class go down the same path as the Cipher, charging up focus with weapons to cast spells, would be beneficial. It’s a tactically interesting distinction that Ciphers need a ramp up time while other casters can be fully effective right from the start of combat. An alternative would be using cooldowns in the same vein as Tyranny, but that also has its limitations, specifically preventing you from using the same spell repeatedly even if it’s tactically optimal. Assuming a caster class with a cooldown limitation always had the capability to cast something, it would nullify the work that has gone into making casters viable with weapons as the preferred strategy would just be to cycle spells instead of auto attack. Limit the spell selection so that gaps in spell usage are enforced and you devalue the casting power of your character.

Basically, there isn’t really a perfect solution, but PoE did a good job of working around the per rest system. Resting is highly encouraged at higher difficulties as the game gives you some fairly significant bonuses from Survival and your chosen rest location. I can’t think of a single dungeon that didn’t have some camping supplies, and the penalties for resting are non existent.

The rest system does have it’s problems, for example it’s a bit of a suspension of disbelief to expect 8 hours uninterrupted sleep inside a half cleared cultists temple. It was also far too easy to remove injuries and fully restore health. I think a better way to handle that would be to split resting into ”full rest” in safe places like inns or the keep, which could last a full 8 hours and heal your party, and ”tactical rest” in dangerous locations that lasted only a few hours and had limited recovery potential but let you get your spells back. That, however, is a discussion for another game and is getting a little off topic from justifying the spells per rest system.

I’m pretty sure the combat is really just not very interesting.
From what I gather from other players and my own experience, the combat mostly just consists of “stand in place and throw abilities”, which gets old really fast. It’s then compounded by their pretty complicated combat system.

Personally, I just gave everyone guns and crossbows and used hit-n-run attacks to gradually wipe out enemies. And sometimes I just got wiped for what appeared to be no particular reason. So yeah, not the biggest fan either.

Best bits of combat were dealing with over-levelled enemies. My main was a dual-wielding Cypher, who recharged his “mana” by damage and used mind-control to turn enemies friendly so that was a big help.

Besides that, I enjoyed spamming various AoE spells (like wall of fine), the druid had a decent selection as well.

Generic combat encounters on the “world” maps were generally boring and repetitive. But the dungeons of Od Nua were fun.

As someone who played all of the Infinity Engine games I did enjoy the combat a lot (played it on Hard). I did find it to be better than the originals. The game shows you the range of spells, and chances of hitting the enemy with each given attack/spell as well as their stats to help you in choosing the best way of attacking.
Positioning is the key and doorways are you friends. There is the Engagement mechanic to help you in stopping enemies from charging your squishy dudes. The pause is a must use in any tough fight. I turn off companion AI as I prefer to have full control over them and had some autopause set (like enemy slain) to make things easier.

Now the big thing:
Infinity Games were the D&D turn based system translated into real time RPG. It is complicated and it is messy. PoE cleaned it up quite a bit and made it more suitable for computer RPG (like hit&miss calculation is much easier to understand in PoE but would be impossible to calculate in tabletop). And it is stat based combat. Defeating tough enemies require lowering their defences while keeping yours high. You need to find your enemy’s weakpoint and abuse it. At the same time you need to find a way to keep yourself protected from his attacks. The problem with PoE system is that if it is easy it is boring as you do nothing, but then it gets tough it can be very fiddly. XCOM works well because it is engaging when it is tough but it is still fun to roll over enemies. What is more, every effect is VISIBLE, skills are UNIQUE. In PoE… just a clusterf*** of colours and way too much time happening at the same time. I still love it though. I love how 30 sec real time combat can take me 10 minutes of careful positioning and calculation.

My most combat situation did fall back on trusty abilities as well, except those “special” onces which I had to carefully plan.

It is not perfect (in many ways it is very flawed and even not good) and it is not for everyone. Luckily the story and writing is well worth the time investment in my opinion.

Having played it all through once (DLC and everything) on the difficulty one step up from normal (Hard? forget the names) I have to agree with you.

I’d like the principle of the engaging/withdraw mechanic, but found in practice the sheer numbers of enemies that would engage, the number of safe withdraw abilities/teleport or abilities that multiplied the enemy made it largely irrelevant. The only thing that worked was natural choke points in the map, but the sheer number of shade/ghosts encounters and an enemy AI that determinedly targeted whoever had the lowest defence resulted in to many fights when my dedicated enemy engager (Eder) as the last one actually engaged.

I also found the proliferation of status effects that each give a different mostly small penalty/bonus made it simultaneously feel both too busy and equally bland.

Also visually especially at high level/end game the combat is mess, I have screenshots where I can’t even see the circles around my characters because the number of overlapping spell effects that went off.

I think I relied entirely on abilities that paralyzed and mind control. And save scumming. Lots of quick loading

Thanks for all your feedback on this. It seems as though i wasn’t missing too much, apart from the hardcore players on the higher difficultly levels (Something i often do on turn based, but rarely pausable realtime).

I think a slower combat system, with more focus on larger reusable abilities would give us more time to plan attacks, defences and combos to defeat foes. Also a slightly better way of defining the lines of combat. At the moment it is a bunch of people in the middle of the screen hitting each other a lot with metal sticks until they fall over. As said though, it is better than a lot out there, so people forgive a lot (me included).

I’m replaying BG – not even on BG2 yet – and it’s a much more engaging experience than PoE. The areas are much larger and allow for more tactical placement and combat, the enemy AI bafflingly seems to be smarter and the game is a bit better at allowing you to work out combat strategies and employ them (in particular, BG’s punishing early difficulty can be overcome by recruiting a full team ASAP and giving everyone missile weapons) without the game trying to find ways of preventing you from doing that.

What PoE does do better is the story (not quite the characters). BG is pretty light on narrative and the story vanishes for hours at a time if you clear out each area systematically (which you need to do to level), whilst PoE does a better job of keeping the story ticking over and giving you a stake in what’s going on at any moment. BG2, however, has a far better, more epic and grander story than PoE’s, easily.

The other weakness of PoE is that it’s too big. The story is interesting but not interesting enough to sustain 40+ hours, and the weaker combat lets it down a lot. I’d rank Tyranny as being a lot better than PoE, actually: the combat is stronger (and getting EXP for killing enemies is great again), the story is better and at 20 hours the story doesn’t outstay its welcome. I also gather some of the improvements for Tyranny are going into PoE2, which is good news.

Divinity: Original Sin has much better combat, possibly than either, but I wouldn’t say the story was very good (although the “save the universe from ancient evil from beyond time” thing being a minor subplot and the opening quests being more about solving a cat’s love life issues is quite entertaining). But I didn’t get very far in D:OS. I need to get back to it.

Mostly, for me, the difference is in how “opinionated” the games are. I can remember cheesing the hell out of some encounters in BG and BG2 and the satisfaction earned from using “unofficial tactics” to finally suceed through an encounter for which your party was not ready, under-leveled, under-equipped and not rested enough to cast a lot. Pillars seems too forced. There’s one way to play it and, if that’s not your style, sorry.

I finally got into Pillars when I restarted with a build off the Internet and strategies from the web. But I still never finished it – I got about half way and then just grew too bored because, while my strategies and build were making the game quite manageable, I wasn’t having fun – I was just following this recepie for success.

And the story simply isn’t good enough to motivate playing the whole thing from a recipie. Not even close to good enough.

Similarly, the story isn’t good enough to motivate playing through it on tourist-mode, either.

I never understood why you have to say “Our own John”. Are there multiple relevant Johns? How many of them are Walkers? How many do you own? Do you own them legally? And who is this “we”? Is it RPS, or you and your gang?

Well, there’s John, then there’s Other John, there’s Short John and of course there are many Long Johns. In fact once you start looking you see Johns everywhere, I wouldn’t advise doing it unless you’re prepared to have the world change forever for you. There are five Johns beside me now that I’m not supposed to know about.

Remember that a low level cap does not always mean little content. Baldur’s Gate 1 with the expansion you could only get to about level 8-10. That is about 50 hours of content. With a level cap increase it could mean anything. There are also more class abilities and designs that they will need to take into consideration. Though it does seem odd that they would just say “Level Cap Increase” and not what that entails. They could just boost all quests in the game to give you a little more xp. Or that could mean that they have more quests for you to do or more things for you to fight in the world.

The first game, with both DLCs, caps at level 16. PoE II will start you at level 1 again (with a plot explanation) and before that stretch goal was released would have had the same cap, which would mean they would not need to develop any new abilities, talents, or spell levels. With the stretch goal released, they’ll add two more levels and appropriate class content for those levels will have to be developed. (or at least implemented – for all I know they already have the design work done on them).

Xoti is a priest/monk, not a monk. That’s important. Companions having more than one innate class allow us for greater customization on subsequent playthroughs without deviating from their core character concept.

I wonder whether they’ll offer other funding options.
PoE 2 is one of the few games I’d actually consider crowdfunding and it’s thwarted by that fig-site, which only accepts credit card and I don’t have one.

I apparently have 100 hours in PoE, but most of that is in the first third of the game. Since it’s come out I must’ve “given it another try” a dozen times with different classes. I’ve always bounced off or burned out before act 3.

I really want to like the game but it has many flaws at different levels.
( – Spells-per-rest encourages hoarding instead of fun, but is also undermined by how trivial resting is. Make camping have more meaningful consequences or don’t bother. I’d prefer they didn’t bother. I want to use my cool spells.
– Visually it’s a mess. It’s very difficult to see what’s happening in complex fights.
– Too many save-or-die-lite effects. Paralyze and charm are fight winners, and are super common. Also it’s just not fun to have your dude get paralyzed or charmed 5-20 seconds.
– The game seems to want to make it matter if you clobber the enemy or just barely scrape by, but it doesn’t. Health is hard to restore, and wounds give penalties, but those are all wiped clean by cheap resting. I don’t see the point of this. So while it’s annoying to have your dude charmed, it doesn’t really matter much if he shotguns your mage down before the effect wears off. You’ll either win slower and ‘rest’ away the damage, or quickload and try again.
– Outside of combat, too much walking-places and loading screens. If you want me to go talk to the lady in her house, just put me in her house. If you want someone to jump me en route, just put me in place as soon as I become aware of the jumpers.
– Path finding is kind of a mess. Party doesn’t walk in formation, gets 3-stooges stuck on each other.)

I’ve been playing on the default difficulty because I assume that’s what the game was balanced the best for.

Oof. Maybe I should start my own blog about games I have problems with.

Any dev studio is usually one big flop away from dire financial trouble and two from shutting its doors. Obsidian was reported to be in big trouble before it kickstarted PoE. I have no issue with them continuing to use this model for some of their games and not getting dictated to by publishers that give no shits for their artistic vision if it compromises a ship date. Having 100k+ prepurchased copies means you don’t have to cut content and skip bug fixes to make the Black Friday ship date.

You’ll notice Tyranny was a smaller project and didn’t get kickstarted and didn’t fare so well, arguably in part because it got a lot less media attention before it was shipped. If they wanted to kickstart to do Tyranny 2 I’d willingly fund it rather than see that IP parked as insufficiently successful for a publisher to push funds into a sequel.

As above. Obsidian is not a rich company by any means, mainly because they’re a bigger company than most using crowdfunding so it doesn’t got as far.

In fact, I think they are much more aware of that problem, which is why they used Fig. It means, in theory, if they make tons of profit on the game that will be filtered back to the funders and allows them to start with a blank slate next time rather than people asking “Where did the money go?” If it’s gone back to them, that’s not so much of a problem.